Compression of the acoustic space in intoxicated speech.

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Researchers at the phonetics-phonology interface frequently invoke “articulatory effort” to explain the behavior of various speech sounds: less effortful sounds are preferred. However, there is scant empirical basis for most claims about which sounds are the effortful ones. This experiment attempts to observe effort reduction in the laboratory by comparing the speech of sober and intoxicated subjects; there is reason to believe that subjects produce more “easy” sounds when intoxicated than when sober. Subjects produced 264 target words containing intervocalic stops, nasal-stop sequences, and stressed vowels. Acoustic analysis of these productions reveals that subjects’ acoustic space was somewhat smaller in the intoxicated condition than in the sober condition for several measures including stop voicing and intensity; however, no such contraction occurred for vowels. These results have two implications. First, compression of the acoustic space suggests that speech in the intoxicated condition may indeed have been less effortful. Second, the results call into question traditional hypotheses about effort reduction: intervocalic stops moved toward the middle of the VOT continuum, rather than becoming more voiced; vowels, contrary to expectation, did not become more centralized. This study highlights the need for further experimental work on the role of articulatory effort in sound patterns.